Major League Baseball Chief Operating Officer Rob Manfred, center, smiles after team owners elected him as the next commissioner of Major League Baseball during an owners quarterly meeting in Baltimore on Thursday. (Steve Ruark/The Associated Press)

Major League Baseball owners elected a new commissioner, Rob Manfred, on Thursday. Manfred will succeed Bud Selig to the job in January 2015.

For a handful of Dodgers players who volunteered an opinion, this was good news.

“I think when (MLB Players Association director) Tony Clark came out and said he was happy with the decision, that probably put a lot of players at ease,” infielder Darwin Barney said. “That’s what it did for me. When I read that he had worked with (Manfred) for a long time and Clark came out publicly saying that we like this decision, that makes a lot of us benign to the whole thing and we could come to work every single day, go to work and go about our business.”

Manfred, 55, has a long background in labor law. He represented the owners’ negotiating committee during the players’ strike of 1994-95. That was the last work stoppage in the sport.

But that association didn’t hurt Manfred’s reputation in the eyes of Barney and Dodgers pitcher Clayton Kershaw, both of whom have experience representing teams to the Players Association.

“The last two decades have been pretty good for baseball,” Kershaw said. “The direction we’re headed is pretty good. But if I was him, I would try to just kind of keep it status quo.”

Manfred has been a full-time MLB employee since 1998, first as its Executive Vice President for Labor Relations and Human Resources. He played a direct role in the successful renewals of baseball’s Collective Bargaining Agreement in 2002, 2006 and 2011.

In 2013, Manfred was named Chief Operating Officer of MLB. Since Selig announced he was retiring at the end of the season, Manfred was seen as the heir apparent.

According to multiple reports out of Baltimore, where the owners met Wednesday and Thursday, three rounds of votes were taken before Manfred had enough support to gain election. By the third round, the vote was unanimous.

Team president Stan Kasten represented the Dodgers at the meeting along with chairman Mark Walter. Kasten described Manfred as “a very close friend for 25 years.”

“He’s as bright a person as you’ll ever find, intellectually,” Kasten said. “As great a passion for this sport as anyone you’ll ever meet, and a mastery of details involving absolutely every facet of our business — legal, business, on-field — so he’s just a wonderful choice.”

The longstanding friendship between Kasten and Manfred raises the possibility that the Dodgers might host an All-Star Game sooner rather than later. Kasten hopes this is the case; the game hasn’t been played in Los Angeles since 1980.

Expanding MLB’s footprint around the globe was among Selig’s top priorities later in his tenure as commissioner. For the Dodgers, that meant flying to Sydney, Australia, in March to begin the regular season against the Arizona Diamondbacks.

With Manfred in charge, Kasten said he doesn’t see the Dodgers playing overseas for at least another two years.

Selig has not taken an active role in the Dodgers’ most pressing off-field issue: The ongoing negotiations between Time Warner Cable and other major providers to carry SportsNet LA, the Dodgers’ team-owned network. Since its inception in March, the network is unavailable to a reported 70 percent of Southern California households.

A number of local congressmen recently asked the Federal Communications Commission to mediate negotiations. Another letter proposed that TWC and DirecTV enter a “binding arbitration” process to settle the dispute.

While the FCC hasn’t taken any formal action since those letters were sent, it’s possible — if not likely — that the government will move more quickly than Selig or Manfred on this matter.

Selig has at least paid lip service to the growing length of baseball games. The average game lasts longer than three hours and is getting longer every year. This was the first issue Dodgers manager Don Mattingly mentioned when asked to identify the commissioner’s top priorities.

“You’ve got to keep trying to get that down,” Mattingly said. “Our demographics. You want younger kids playing, younger kids watching the game. I think those are some of the issues.”

Another issue close to the hearts of some Dodgers players might reach the commissioner’s office sooner.

Carl Crawford recently began sponsoring a Little League team from Chicago whose players are all African-American. The 33-year-old outfielder from Houston said the all African-American Little League he grew up playing in no longer exists.

As the percentage of African-American players in MLB dwindles to rates not seen since the 1950s, should the commissioner be doing more?

Crawford said it would be among his top priorities.

“I think we should be doing everything possible to try to get black kids playing baseball again,” he said. “The numbers are getting lower and lower every year.”

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